ANN RULE PRESENTS THE STRANGER BESIDE ME

This is an eyewitness account written from the darkest depths imaginable—the intimate story of a friend who became a stranger, and the stranger who became one of the most notorious serial killers in the annals of American crime.

Ann Rule (Emmy and Golden Globe winner Barbara Hershey, Beaches) is an ex-cop working the suicide hotlines in Seattle. To make ends meet, she indulges in another obsession—writing true-crime stories. She has a daughter, a fulfilling life, and a good friend in a man named Ted Bundy (Golden Globe nominee Billy Campbell, Once and Again), a handsome and intelligent charmer who’s just been accepted into law school in Utah. What’s captivating Ann’s attention now is a string of brutal murders—missing-women cases that have stretched from Utah to Seattle. It’s being called the most intriguing unsolved series of crimes since Jack the Ripper. Thanks to her efficiency in following the case, Ann has been offered the biggest chance of her career—turn the articles into a book. But the more closely she looks at the clues, the more clearly she sees that it’s her friend Ted, until the dreadful and unavoidable truth is staring her in the face.

There might have been a moment when he could have stopped. He could have saved himself and spared so many others. But that’s assuming he was somebody else…before he became a monster. After months of detective work, sly manoeuvring by the killer, and intense moral conflict on Ann’s part, Ted Bundy is finally charged in the murders of three women. He hints that the toll could be more than thirty-five. Ann suspects his spree could have begun when he was still in his teens, and a little girl on his paper route vanished off the face of the earth. Eighteen years after the charismatic, troubled Ted Bundy befriended Ann Rule, he was executed for his horrific crimes. Only one woman, who shared laughter, lunches, phone calls and, ultimately, interviews behind prison walls, could tell his story from such a unique and provocative angle—one more terrifying than any fiction writer could have imagined.

Unbelievably authentic, terribly shocking, this is the true-crime television event of the year based on Ann Rule’s sensational New York Times bestseller, The Stranger Beside Me.